Earthship: Biotecture
The Earthship Academy
This past June, I spent a month in beautiful Taos, New Mexico doing the 4-week course at the Earthship Biotecture Academy. I met the most incredible people, explored as much of that city as possible in a month-long stay, and spent every weekend out and about on a new adventure.
I had mixed feelings going into the program and forced myself to approach the experience with an open mind. My main concern was the cost. Or instead, if the experience I got was going to be worth the $2,150 tuition they requested. Not to mention another $500 for the living accommodations that were problematic at best, but I’ll touch more on that later.
Overall, what sold the experience for me was the people I was paired with. I made some genuine friends, some of which I’m still in frequent contact with and plan to see soon several months later. If it weren’t for them, or if chance had me paired with a less desirable group, I believe I would have left feeling I didn’t get my money’s worth.
While this conclusion doesn’t bode well for the Academy’s program, I did learn a lot and left feeling educated and inspired to learn even more.
History of the Earthship
It’s impossible to talk about Earthships without talking about the guy who created them, Michael Reynolds. Mike implements many different building techniques from around the world and has refined his process to create a very efficient and reliable building module.
Mike grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He credits his dad’s habit of collecting and reusing materials to be an early inspiration for what would later become his life’s work.
Mike graduated from the University of Cincinnati and, within two years, had already completed building his first house made from recycled materials.
Capitalizing on the lack of a recycling program in Taos, Mike went from bars to local business owners asking them what they do with their old cans. Mike developed a makeshift brick by tying eight cans together with some wire and used them as the building blocks of his earliest building model.
He used rounded walls to increase its structural integrity and developed a makeshift straightforward, and “low-skill” way of Building.
Eventually, Mike realized he could use all sorts of materials to build these homes, not only recycled cans. This was when he thought of using old tires to build walls. A staple material still being used in Earthships today.
Mike started calling his practice “Earthship Biotecture”. The name “Earthship” stems from the idea that sailors must have everything they need to survive while out at sea. That same principle of self-reliance applied to a home on land makes it a ship on solid earth. An Earthship.
Mike and his team began to expand their practice, pushing the boundaries of building codes and experimenting through trial and error to make these houses as energy efficient as possible.
They created several different off-grid communities in the rural regions of northern New Mexico. First was the Rural Earthship Alternative Community Habitat (REACH), and the next was the Social Transformation Alternative Republic (STAR). Both communities were founded with the idea of “radical sustainability,” and each suffered its unique struggles and challenges.
As Mike’s design for the Earthships improved, he began traveling the world to teach his unique building methods to impoverished people worldwide. Teaching those without access to power or clean water to build houses that protect them from the elements and harvest drinking water, all while only using materials accessible in their area.
In 1994, Mike and the team launched the Greater World Earthship Community, a plot of 633 acres just past the Rio Grande Gorge outside of Taos, New Mexico. An ideal location, matched with a new design focused on adding comfort to sustainable homes, made Mike’s designs more accessible than ever.
Today the Greater World Community houses over 80 Earthships, with more being built each year. Several are available on Airbnb, and you can even purchase a new house as it’s being made and become a member of the community today.
Also on this property is the famous Earthship Academy. Located just beside the visitor center, those who attend the academy with familiarize themselves with all the most famous Earthship buildings and come to know their unique quirks and names. If you pay for housing, you may even come to consider some communal spaces like the “Hive” or “Area 52” as a home away from home.
Building an Earthship
The Philosophy of an Earthship is to observe the unarguable phenomena found in nature and utilize them to serve the six necessities of modern-day people.
These six necessities, referred to as “The Six Points” by Mike and the team, are the foundation of life as a human being and can/should be applied to any form of building design.
The Six Points
-Building with Natural & Recycled Materials
-Thermal/Solar Heating and Cooling
-Food Production
-Water Harvesting
-Solar and Wind Electricity
-Contained Sewage Treatment
The design of an Earthship is more technical than one might imagine, so to help explain how these incredible buildings work, I will describe how each of the six points is met in the current module.
Building with Natural & Recycled Materials
There are three primary materials used in the construction of Earthships in the Greater World that come directly from recycling wasted materials. It’s important to note that the materials used for your construction depend on where you are and what resources are available. If in a location without access to these specific materials, the team will redesign their buildings to accommodate the different materials.
Tires
Making up the bulk of the recycled materials, car tires are used to create nearly every wall of your earthship. Pack each tire with rammed earth and stack them over one another as if they were a brick. It’s important to collect tires that are all the same size so that the thickness of your walls is consistent throughout the house.
Cans
Aluminum cans are another essential material used in building Earthships and are often incorporated in a way that makes them visible, adding a unique aesthetic to the design. Can-walls are built by crimping one side of the can and pressing that side into the mortar stacked atop other cans like a brick.
Glass Bottles
Glass bottles are used in specifically artistic ways, to demonstrate that reused materials can even be beautiful when properly applied to a design. The bottles are cut on-site, dried, and then taped together to form a “bottle brick”. Much like the can-walls, bottle bricks are laid with mortar, with the bottoms revealed to showcase their design. The bottle bricks are not used in any load-bearing walls and are best utilized in an outside-facing wall that allows natural light to illuminate the different colored bottles used in the design.
A natural product, like adobe, is perfect to use in a location like our site at the Greater World Community. The earth there is rich with clay, giving the builders consistent access to adobe at any given work site.
Thermal/Solar Heating and Cooling
Also referred to as passive solar heating and cooling, meeting this necessity is one of the most ingenious aspects of the entire Earthship design. Because we’re in the northern hemisphere, the south-facing wall of any building is the one with the most direct sun exposure. Earthships take advantage of this by building a greenhouse onto the south-facing wall, ensuring the most sunlight is captured.
It’s important to build your walls and floors out of conductive materials. Tire walls work perfectly because their “thermal mass” allows them to retain large stores of heat that will radiate throughout the house long after the sun has set, keeping the house warm throughout the cold winter nights.
Not needing a fire during the winter is incredible, but this design has a drawback. The summer months get hot in New Mexico, and this design does little to cool off the inside of the building. To fix this issue, the team implemented several design changes.
The south-facing windows were set at an angle, capitalizing on the different placements of the sun in the differing seasons. This ensures the maximum amount of sunlight is captured in the winter and the minimum amount during the summer.
The team also began burying the north-facing wall, giving their houses the appearance of being built into a hill. They then installed metal convection tubes running deep underneath the frost line of the hill. Despite the temperature outside, you will find a consistently cool temperature if you dig deep enough. Opening raised windows on the south-facing wall with these buried tubes creates a convection current. The hot air rises from the high window, pulling cool air from the metal tube below into your house without using any electricity at all.
While all this passive technology is incredible, the design could only reach proper homeostasis after implementing a second greenhouse on the outside of the initial south-facing greenhouse. The tilted glass wall would be built on the outside of the flat glass wall, creating the “buffer zone” in the space between them. The temperature of the buffer zone will fluctuate between 60-80 degrees, but this allows the interior temperature of the building to maintain a moderate 70 degrees year-round.
Food Production
The soil beds built under the south-facing greenhouse walls serve several purposes in the Earthship design. Greywater from your shower drains and sink faucets is recycled into the beds, passively watering your plants as you and your family operate naturally throughout the day.
All vegetation is planted in these beds, allowing a bio-diverse atmosphere inside your buffer zone. Often smaller beds will be placed beyond the second greenhouse, growing small flowers or herbs inside the interior of the main house.
Depending on the size of the design, even small trees can be incorporated into your soil beds, bringing a natural ambiance to these living quarters unlike any other I’ve encountered.
Water Harvesting
Especially in a dry climate like the one found in Taos, New Mexico, it’s vital to your survival and the survival of your plant life that you have access to clean water. Not only building their systems to catch ample water the few times a year it does rain but also installing large enough cisterns to store this water through the dryer months.
The current earthship model installs a northern slanting roof, feeding the water into a catchment that fills four separate 1,700-gallon cisterns. They segregate these cisterns in pairs of two to allow access to at least half your water supply when it comes time to clean them.
The rainwater then flows into the Water Organizing Module(WOM) where it is sorted and filtered depending on the differing needs of the home. The water is filtered for general use throughout shower heads and sink faucets, with drinking water undergoing an additional filtration system to ensure it’s clean enough for human consumption.
Contained Sewage Treatment
Earthships are built with an advanced water system that sees the water recycled and utilized four times before finding its way into the septic tank.
Rainwater collected in the cisterns is filtered into either drinking water or faucet use. Once used, the greywater is filtered, providing water and nutrients to the different soil beds or to be re-used in your toilet. After being flushed down the bathroom, the black water is lead into a leach field, providing water and nutrients to different non-consumable plants. You don’t want to plant any foods or herbs in the leech field because your blackwater has not been properly treated and can carry harmful pathogens. After that, it finally filters down into your septic tank ending the water cycle in your earthship.
Solar and Wind Electricity
Being completely off-grid does not mean we wish to live without the modern conveniences of accessible electricity. Taos is known for getting incredible amounts of sun exposure year-round, which makes collecting energy from solar panels very reliable in the Greater World Community.
Each house is equipped with its own Power Organizing Module(POM) which houses a load center, charge controller, battery stores, and an inverter to allow AC appliances to operate in your home.
The system is not incredibly unique to other systems running off solar energy, but keep in mind these houses are entirely off-grid, so you must be careful to avoid drawing too much power from the batteries all at once, or you might trip the breaker.
The Academy
One of the most impressive aspects of the Biotecture practice is their desire to spread the knowledge they have developed through trial and error over almost 50 years of sustainable building.
The Earthship Academy is just next to the visitor center on the Greater World Property. For what is now $2,500, anyone over the age of 18 can enroll in a four-week course that will teach you the history and basics you need to be able to build your own earthship.
The topics cover a wide range of topics such as electrical, plumbing, carpentry, masonry, and many more. While you get a general understanding of how these skills are applied to the earthship design, if you don’t already have these skills, you will not be at a professional level with them by the end of the course.
Classes
At 9 a.m. every morning, students meet in the classroom for two separate lectures that typically last until noon. The lectures are often taught by different teachers, covering a wide range of related topics.
You will have many teachers through the course of the academy, and their effectiveness as teachers ranges from excellent to not-so-great. None are terrible, but there was one teacher, in particular, I remember the entire class having many contentions about.
You are given a paperback textbook at the beginning of the academy and a syllabus detailing what topics will be covered by which teachers on each specific day. There is required reading given as homework before specific classes, but never consisting of more than 10-15 pages, and one significant group homework assignment you will work on throughout the entire course.
On the last day of class, each student must take a 100-question test to receive certification for completing the course. Any student below 60% will fail, but the questions are straightforward enough that not a single person in my class did so. I recommend taking notes throughout the course with the test in mind, but if you don’t care about the college credits you get with your certification, you can opt out of the test and walk away with the wealth of knowledge the course provided.
Job Sites
After your classes, you get a 45-minute lunch, followed by several hours of hands-on work at one of the builds being added to the Greater World Community. The 30 or so students attending the academy will be broken up into groups of about 6, and each group will be sent to separate builds at different stages of development. Because it takes longer than a month to build an Earthship, this allows students to have hands-on experience at multiple different stages of the building process.
Labs
There are three labs that each happen toward the end of the academy, and if you’re a hands-on learner like me, you may find them incredibly helpful.
The first lab is constructing your own mock Water Organizing Module(WOM) out of PVC scraps and different filters. You are allowed to use your notes, and while you aren’t being graded, you will be competing against the other groups for the honor of being the smartest Earthship plumber.
The second lab is very similar to the first; only you construct your own mock Power Organizing Module(POM) instead of the WOM or, at least, a scaled-down version. They have you create a circuit with a breaker and connect a switch to a light bulb. Not trying to brag, but my partner and I won this one and had our light shining nice and bright before anyone else did.
The last lab brought us outside and had us mockup laying the foundation for a floor plan given to us by the instructors. We were given many yards of string and tasked with measuring and staking where all the walls would be for the would-be earthship. The most important part was using the compass to ensure your south-facing wall was facing the opposite of true north and not the opposite of magnetic north, as the angles orient slightly differently for the sun and the north pole.
The Housing
The largest and most consistent complaint I heard among the other students involved the student housing you pay for at the academy. I’m racking my brain trying to decide where to begin.
I went into shared housing expecting I would have to bunk with someone or have a roomy like in a college dorm, but it’s a little more private than that. My house had four separate bedrooms, each connected by the buffer zone hallway stretching across the south side of each room. This meant your entire room was open to the hallway, and people could walk by and see you at any moment, but it also meant you’d feel like you had your own space if everyone kept to their rooms.
Most significantly, our house didn’t have access to clean drinking water because the student housing consists of all the old buildings built before they had fine-tuned the Earthship design. The rainwater is caught in an open cistern, exposed to the sun, and open to all critters looking for a drink. This means the hand washing and shower water in my building had growing green algae and, at one point, a dead squirrel. Suffice it to say no one was surprised when I started showering at a friend’s house and had one of my housemates move to a different building entirely.
Each of the housing buildings has its own unique issues. Some have small holes that let in little bugs like spiders and crickets (and man are the crickets loud here), and others have horrible leaks that make staying inside really no fun at all during heavy rain. Mine was the ladder. The leaks were so bad that the water turned the adobe on the wall back into mud, and a whole square foot of the stuff fell smack down in the middle of our common area.
The Group
I was told time and time again by the instructors that our group was particularly friendly to one another. There was no drama, and we ended up planning extraordinary events and hangouts pretty much every weekend or rainy day (you don’t work on job sites when you get rained out!). I’m super grateful for this because it honestly felt like hanging out with a group of 30ish people that were all close friends.
The activities around the Greater World Community are all awesome as well. Even if you don’t have a group you connect with, there’s plenty to do in your free time. Hot springs and rock climbing just a 15-minute drive from the visitor center. There are beautiful hikes, like the Rio Grande Gorge, and Taos itself is just a short 20 minutes away providing incredible food, an adorable downtown, and my personal favorite farmers market ever.
My opinion might be a little biased because I could never know if the academy would have felt as worth it had I been paired with different people. It’s funny to think how the world works because I actually changed my plans and decided to attend the month of June instead of May at the very last minute. I’m sure I would have met some interesting and like-minded people there as well, but I wouldn’t trade the friends I made for anything in the world.
Room For Improvement
All the knowledge and friends I got from my one month in Taos can’t change the fact that the Earthship design and program have a lot of room for improvement.
My biggest gripe was how the buildings did not meet the promises being made by the people who built them. Primarily the claim that they’re completely off-grid, and that you can grow enough food to not have to go to the grocery store
The Earthships have a very efficient water catchment system, but in the deserts of New Mexico, rainfall is not a guarantee. During my academy, we had a truck bring a massive load of city water to fill all the dwindling cisterns. I understand that this happens from time to time, but from what I gathered from the staff there, it’s a fairly common occurrence.
One thing that I’ve heard Michael Reynolds claim both in interviews and in person is that with the food production of an earthship, you won’t have to have to go to the supermarket to eat. Theoretically, I believe this could be possible if you used exterior land from the earthship to create more garden beds, and possibly got some poultry and or livestock, but as the buildings are currently constructed this is strictly untrue.
The garden beds inside the earthship are watered by the grey water cycled through your shower and sink drains. This grey water often has soaps, oils, and food scraps that make for a very specific soil composition that is harmful to most plants. Certain plants can grow in this environment, but the list of edible ones is very limited. Almost every Earthship has either a fig or a banana tree, with no other edible foods available. I saw one grapevine, and a couple of odd berry bushes I can’t remember the names of, but not even close to the amount of food production necessary to sustain anyone, let alone your entire family.
